Rifters 3 - Behemoth

by Peter Watts

  "Go to sleep," she whispered.

  Within moments, Ricketts' wide, nervous eyes fluttered closed. It was like watching a lethal injection.

  "Do you know who I am, you miserable fetus-fucker?" the demon spat.

  No, she thought.

  "I'm Lenie Clarke!"

  The system crashed.

  "Yeah," Clarke said softly. "Right."

  She traded a dark view for a brighter one. Phocoena's viewport looked out on a muddy plain, not quite featureless; the muddy tracks of tunneling animals, the holes of invertebrate burrows stippled the bottom. A lone crab scuttled lethargically in the dim distance.

  The ocean overhead was murky green, and growing brighter. The sun must be rising.

  "What...?"

  She hung the headset on the armrest and turned in the copilot's seat. Phocoena was too small to warrant a dedicated med cubby, but the fold-down bunk on the starboard side pulled double-duty in a pinch. It tucked away into the same kind of molded indentation that held the bunks on the opposite bulkhead; unlike its counterparts, though, its thicker base bulged from the wall in a smooth distension of plumbing and circuitry. When in use it folded down like a wide, short drawbridge, hung by twin monofilament threads spooled from its outer corners. Those threads, the edges of the pallet itself, and the overhanging bulkhead formed the vertices of a little tent. Isolation membrane stretched across the planes between.

  Ricketts was trapped within. He lay on his side with one arm flopped against the membrane, distending it outward.

  "Hi," Clarke said.

  "Where's this?"

  "We're underwater." She climbed back from her seat into the main cabin, keeping her head low; the curving hull didn't leave a lot of headroom.

  He tried to sit up. He had even less headroom than she did. "What am I, you know..."

  She took a breath. "You've got a—a bug. It's contagious. I thought it would be best to keep you isolated."

  His bruises were already healing, thanks to Miri's attentions. The rest of his face paled behind them. "The witch?" And then, remembering: "But I brought you that cure, right...?"

  "The cure wasn't—all we'd been hoping for," Clarke said. "It actually turned out to be something...else..."

  He thought about that a moment. He pushed his splayed fingers against the membrane. The membrane stretched, iridescing.

  "You saying...you saying it's like another disease?"

  "Afraid so."

  "So that explains it," he murmured.

  "Explains what?"

  "Why I been so weak the last coupla days. Prob'ly still have my bike if I'd been just that much faster." He frowned at her. "So you go around broadbanding how this germware kicks ßehemoth's ass and how we're supposed to like, collect it and all, and it's really just another bug?"

  "Sorry," she said softly.

  "Fuck." Ricketts lay back on the pallet and threw one arm over his face. "Ow," he added, almost as an afterthought.

  "Yeah, your arm's going to be sore for a bit. You were pretty badly beat up, the MI can't fix everything just like that."

  He held up the limb and examined it. "It does feel a lot better, though. Everything feels better. Thanks."

  Clarke forced a smile.

  He was up on his elbows, looking from the smaller cage into the larger one. "This whole set-up isn't bad. Way better than that priestly meat wagon."

  It wasn't, of course. Phocoena's med facilities were rudimentary at best, far below what the MI could offer. "I'm afraid you'll have to stay in there for a while," Clarke said apologetically. "I know it's cramped, but the onboard's got games and shows, help you pass the time." She gestured at a headset hanging from the roof of the nook. "I can give you access."

  "Great. Better'n an oven."

  "Oven?"

  "You know." He tapped his temple. "Microwaves. Give you a fine buzz if you jimmy the doors and stick your head just so."

  Good trick, Clarke mused. Wish I'd known it when I was a kid.

  Then again, maybe I did...

  "What if I have to shit?" Ricketts wondered.

  She nodded at a convex button set into the recessed bulkhead. "The pallet converts. Push that when you have to go. It's pretty straightforward."

  He did, then let out a little yelp of surprise as the midsection of the pallet slid smoothly away underneath him. His ass bumped down on the wide rim of the bowl beneath.

  "Wow," he whispered, impressed out of all proportion. Another press of the button and the pallet reintegrated.

  "So what now?" he asked.

  Now you get to be a lab rat. Now you'll go to some place where machines cut pieces out of you until either you die, or the thing inside of you does. Now, you'll be grilled on how long you hung around in Freeport, how many others you might have breathed on, how many others they might have. They'll find out about that asshole who beat you up and maybe they'll want to interview him. Or maybe not. Maybe they'll just decide it's already gone too far for pleasant interviews and nice individual extractions—because after all, if we have to sacrifice you to save Freeport, surely we also have to sacrifice Freeport to save New England now, don't we? That's the greater good for you, kid. It's a sliding scale. It's concentric.

  And nobody's life is worth shit when they slap it onto the table.

  She'd roll the dice. Maybe hundreds would die in flames. Maybe only Ricketts would, in pieces.

  "Hello?" Ricketts said. "You here?"

  Clarke blinked. "Sorry?"

  "I said, what now?"

  "I don't know yet," she told him.

  Paranoid

  Aaron had led to Beth. Beth had led to Habib, and Habib had led to Xander, and the whole lot of them had led to twenty thousand hectares of wasted New England countryside being put to the flame. And that wasn't all: According to the chatter on the restricted band there were at least three other operatives sweeping the field further south, Desjardins's preference for low profiles notwithstanding.

  Eight days now, and Seppuku was living up to the hype. It was spreading faster than ßehemoth ever had.

  Xander had also led to Phong, and Phong was fighting back. Lubin had him cornered in the mouth of an old storm-sewer that drooled slimy water into the Merrimack River. The mouth was a good two meters in diameter, set into a concrete cliff perhaps three times that height. It had a tongue, a triangular spillway widening out towards the river, flanked by rising abutments that held back the banks to either side. The spillway constituted the only clear avenue of approach and was slippery with brownish-green scum.

  The mouth also had teeth, a grate of metal bars set a meter back from the opening. They kept Phong from escaping underground, and had forced him to fall back on his one high card: an antique firearm that shot bullets of indeterminate caliber. Lubin trumped him twice over on that score; he carried a Schubert active-denial microwave pistol that could heat flesh to 60°C, and a Heckler & Koch rapid-fire PDW that was currently loaded with mitigated conotoxins. Unfortunately there was way too much earth and concrete for the microwaves to penetrate from Lubin's present position, and getting a clear shot with the H&K would involve exposing himself on the slimy slope of the spillway.

  It shouldn't have mattered. Under normal circumstances it would still be the furthest thing from an even match, even granting Lubin's rusty marksmanship after five years. Even though Phong's refuge was in shadow, and the sun stabbed directly into Lubin's eyes whenever he peeked around the corner. Those all made the shot trickier, no question. Still. Lubin was a professional.

  No, what really skewed the odds was the fact that Phong seemed to have a thousand bodyguards, and they were all attacking Lubin at once.

  He'd scarcely noticed them on approach: a cloud of midges hovering over a patch of resistant greenery on the embankment. They'd always been completely harmless in Lubin's experience. He'd dispersed them with a wave of his hand as he passed through, his attention on the concrete barrier that cut the riverbank just ahead...and in the next instant they'd attacked, a sw
arm of mosquito-sized insects with piranha-sized attitudes.

  They bit, and they distracted, and they broke both his concentration and his stealth. Phong, stealing a drink from the sewer, had seen him coming and squeezed off a near miss before ducking back under cover. He'd almost escaped entirely, but Lubin had plunged through the insectile onslaught to the edge of the drainage apron, just in time to trap his quarry back against the tunnel.

  "I'm here to get you to a hospital!" he called. "You've been exposed to—"

  "Fuck you!" Phong shouted back.

  A squad of dive-bombing insects attacked Lubin's hand, almost in formation; the little bastards had followed him. He slapped down hard. He missed his attackers but welcomed the sting of the impact. He unrolled the gloves from the wrists of his isolation skin and slipped them on, juggling the Schubert, then reached over his shoulder for the hood.

  The velcro tab on the back of his collar was empty. His hood was probably hanging off some low-lying branch in the woods behind him.

  And he was going up against someone who'd been exposed to Seppuku for two full days. Lubin allowed himself a muttered, "Shit."

  "I don't want to hurt you!" he tried again. Which wasn't exactly true, and getting less so. The desire to kill something was certainly circling around his self-control. More insects attacked; he crushed them between hand and forearm, and reached to wipe the smashed body parts off against the river bank. He paused, briefly distracted: it was hard to be certain, but those crushed bodies seemed to have too many legs.

  He wiped them off and focused on the immediate task. "You're coming with me," he called, his voice raised but level. "That's not up for discussion." Insects have—right. Six legs. He waved off another assault; a line of pinpricks lit up the back of his neck. "The only issue is whether you come now or later."

  "Later, stumpfuck! I know whose side you on!"

  "We can also discuss whether I'll be taking you to a hospital or a crematorium," Lubin muttered.

  A squadron targeted his face. He slapped his forehead, hard. His hand came away with three tiny carcasses flattened against the palm. Each had eight legs.

  What has eight legs? Spiders? Flying spiders?

  Hunting in packs?

  He wiped his palm against a patch of convenient vines matting the embankment. The vines squirmed at his touch.

  He pulled his hand back instinctively, shocked. What the—

  Tweaked, obviously. Or some kind of accidental hybrid. The foliage clenched and relaxed in peristaltic waves.

  Focus. Keep on track.

  More dive-bombers. Not quite so many this time. Maybe he'd swatted most of the swarm already. He felt as if he'd swatted a hundred swarms.

  A scrabbling, from beyond the barrier.

  Lubin peeked around the abutment. Phong was making a break for it, scrambling along a dry strip of concrete edging the far side of the spillway. Startling graffiti decorated the wall behind him, a stylized female face with white featureless eyes and a zigzag moniker: MM.

  Phong saw him, fired three wild rounds. Lubin didn't even bother to duck; his microwave was already set on wide beam, too diffuse for a quick kill but easily strong enough to reheat Phong's last meal along with most of the gastrointestinal tract that was holding it. Phong doubled over, retching, to land on the thin skin of wastewater and the frictionless slime beneath it. He slid diagonally down the spillway, out of control. Lubin put one foot on a convenient dry patch and leaned out to catch him as he passed.

  The Airborne Spider Brigade chose that exact moment for its last hurrah.

  Suddenly Lubin's face and neck were wrapped in stinging nettles. Overextended, he struggled for balance. Phong sailed past; one flailing leg careened against Lubin's ankle. Lubin went over like a pile of very angry bricks.

  They slid off the spillway into freefall.

  It wasn't a long drop, but it was a hard landing. The Merrimack was a mere shadow of its former self; they landed not in water but on a broken mosaic of shale and cracked mud, barely moistened by the outfall. Lubin got some slight satisfaction from the fact that Phong landed underneath him.

  Phong threw up again on impact.

  Lubin rolled away and stood, wiping vomit from his face. Shards of shale snapped and slipped beneath his feet. His face and neck and hands itched maddeningly. (At least he seemed to have finally shaken the kamikaze arthropods.) His right forearm was skinned and oozing, the supposedly-unbreachable isolation membrane ripped from palm to elbow. A knife-edged splinter of stone, the size of his thumb, lay embedded in the heel of his hand. He pulled it free. The jolt that shot up his forearm felt almost electrical. Blood welled from the gash. Mopping at the gore revealed clumped particles of fatty tissue, like clusters of ivory pinheads, deep in the breach.

  The microwave pistol lay on the scree a few meters away. He retrieved it, wincing.

  Phong still lay on his back, winded, bruised, his left leg twisted at an angle impossible to reconcile with the premise of an intact tibia. His skin reddened as Lubin watched, small blisters rising on his face in the wake of the microwave burst. Phong was in bad shape.

  "Not bad enough," Lubin remarked, looking down at him.

  Phong looked up through glazed eyes and muttered something like Wha...

  You were not worth the trouble, Lubin thought. There was no excuse for me to even break a sweat over the likes of you. You're nothing. You're less than nothing. How dare you get so lucky. How dare you piss me off like this.

  He kicked Phong in the ribs. One broke with a satisfying snap.

  Phong yelped.

  "Shhh," Lubin murmured soothingly. He brought the heel of his boot down on Phong's outstretched hand, ground it back and forth. Phong screamed.

  Lubin spent a moment contemplating Phong's right leg—the intact one—but decided to leave it unbroken. There was a certain aesthetic in the asymmetry. Instead, he brought his foot down again, hard, on the broken left one.

  Phong screamed and fainted, escaping into brief oblivion. It didn't matter; Lubin's hard-on had been assured with the first snapping bone.

  Go on, he urged himself.

  He walked unhurriedly around the broken man until he found himself next to Phong's head. Experimentally, he lifted his foot.

  Go on. It doesn't matter. Nobody cares.

  But he had rules. They weren't nearly so inviolable as when he'd been Guilt Tripped, but in a way that was the whole point. To make his own decisions. To follow his own algorithm. To prove he didn't have to give in, to prove he was stronger than his impulses.

  Prove it to who? Who's here to care? But he already knew the answer.

  It's not his fault. It's yours.

  Lubin sighed. He lowered his foot, and waited.

  "A man named Xander gave you a vial," he said calmly, squatting at Phong's side a half-hour later.

  Phong stared wide-eyed and shook his head. He did not seem pleased to be back in the real world. "Please...don't—"

  "You were told that it contained a counteragent, that it would kill off ßehemoth if it was disseminated widely enough. I thought so myself, at first. I understand that you were only trying to do the right thing." Lubin leaned in close. "Are you following me, Phong?"

  Phong gulped and nodded.

  Lubin stood. "We were both misinformed. The vial you were given will only make things worse. If you hadn't been so busy trying to kill me you could have saved us both a lot—" A sudden thought occurred to him. "Just out of interest, why were you trying to kill me?"

  Phong looked torn.

  "I'd really like to know," Lubin said, without the slightest trace of threat in his voice.

  "You—they said people trying to stop the cure," Phong blurted.

  "Who?"

  "Just people. On the radio." Alone, helpless, half his bones broken, and still he was trying to protect his contacts. Not bad, Lubin had to admit.

  "We're not," he said. "And if you had been in touch with Xander and Aaron and their friends lately, you'd know that for yo
urself. They're very sick."

  "No." It was probably meant to be a protest, but Phong didn't seem able to put any conviction into the word.

  "I need to know what you did with that vial," Lubin said.

  "I...I ate it," Phong managed.

  "You ate it. You mean, you drank the contents."

  "Yes."

  "You didn't disseminate it anywhere. You drank it all yourself."

  "Yes."

  "Why, may I ask?"

  "They say it cure ßehemoth. I—I first stage already. They say I dead by winter, and I could not get into forts..."

  Lubin didn't dare touch the man, not with his isolation skin in tatters. He studied Phong's exposed and reddened skin, at the blisters rising across it. If there had been any obvious signs of either ßehemoth or Seppuku, they were now indistinguishable under the burns. He tried to remember if Phong had presented any symptoms prior to being shot.

  "When did you do this?" he asked at last.

  "Two days. I felt fine until...you...you..." Phong squirmed weakly, winced at the result.

  Two days. Seppuku was fast, but all the symptomatic vectors Lubin had encountered had been infected for longer than that. It was probably only a matter of hours before Phong started presenting. A day or two at most.

  "—to me?" Phong was saying.

  Lubin looked down at him. "What?"

  "What you do to me?"

  "A lifter's on the way. You'll be in a medical facility by nightfall."

  "I'm sorry," Phong said, and coughed. "They say I be dead by winter," he repeated in a weak voice.

  "You will be," Lubin told him.

  Matryoska

  Clarke didn't make the call.

  She'd had closer contact with Ricketts than anyone except the person who'd assaulted him, and she'd checked out clean. She was willing to bet that the people of Freeport were clean too.

  She wasn't willing to bet that the trigger fingers would agree with her.

  She knew the arguments. She knew the virtues of erring on the side of caution. She just didn't buy them, not when the people making those decisions sat in untouchable far-off towers adding columns of empty numbers and Bayesian probabilities. Maybe the experts were right, maybe the only people truly qualified to run the world were those without conscience—clear-eyed, rational, untroubled by the emotional baggage that the sight of piled bodies could induce in the unblessed. People weren't numbers, but maybe the only way to do the right thing was to act as if they were.